Page 56 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Dragos

I T’S LIKE I’ M living an entirely different life in the same body that experienced all of the disastrous things that it did. But Cassandra was there with me. My Cassandra. And she makes everything feel endurable. My sunshine.

She keeps me from descending into the darkness.

This charity event is the first thing I’ve ever done for the broader good.

I’ve done good things that served me, but never for the sake of it.

I feel like my skin is too tight for my body.

I’ve been meeting with women who are survivors of domestic violence, representatives who are going to speak tonight, and encourage donors to open their wallets.

Their stories feel so close to my own experience of growing up in a house where violence was normal.

I never thought that I would have something in common with a housewife from Essex. I do, though. The problem with all of this is that I’m becoming human. Where before I think I existed somewhere outside humanity.

But this is doing nothing but driving home the truth that my father was a man like far too many men.

And he turned me into something a bit too close to him.

The one thing that makes me feel even a little bit proud is that I never raised my hand to a woman. At least I can look at these women knowing that he didn’t manage to make me into the kind of person who relished harming those weaker than himself.

Cassandra looks beautiful. Dressed in bright pink, her dress hugging her glorious curves.

The artwork she’s done is truly stunning. Idyllic images of home. But there is something dark underneath the surface. For those that have experienced home in a manner that didn’t mean safety, these paintings of houses on manicured streets, family dinners, create a sense of disquiet.

It is exceptional, I think. The emotion that she has packed into these pieces.

The pieces by her friends are good. But they are nothing in comparison to what she’s done.

Perhaps I’m biased. But I don’t think so.

I take her hand, and when the band starts playing I pull her in for a dance. We’ve never done things like this. She looks up at me, delighted. I twirl her, and she comes back to me. I hold her against my body, and I feel my heartbeat quicken.

We can’t stay away from each other. In an ideal world, perhaps we might’ve abstained while we worked on our relationship. But for us, this physical connection is so much a part of who we are, that even when we try to keep our distance, we can’t.

But there are moments like this, which feel different.

This romance. I experienced it for the first time with her.

I remember when we went to France, and I got to watch her experience Paris for the first time.

She loved it. She fell in love with it while she fell in love with me, and I hoarded all of those good feelings to myself.

But I didn’t want to give them back.

Because that felt frightening. As I hold her close against me, nothing feels frightening.

She looks up at me. “What are you thinking?”

She would think that my thoughts were absurd. “I was thinking about how my feelings for you frighten me.”

There. I said it. I’m honest. For perhaps the first time. In my life, the life that I experienced with my father, there was never any room for fear. It wasn’t an acknowledged emotion.

Such a strange thing, to live beneath the iron fist of an awful man, and to never be given a vocabulary for the wrenching terror that you felt.

Because a man was never afraid, and I was never a child. I was only ever supposed to be a man.

Telling her now that I’m afraid of anything… It’s like peeling off a layer of skin.

“Me?”

“Yes. Because I don’t know how to hope for anything good.

I don’t know how to hope for anything softer, lovely.

I don’t know how to hope for us. I was never given a framework for that.

I was never given… A path toward hope at all.

I wonder now if I had known what it would be like to try and hang onto this sunshine if I would’ve done it. ”

“Is it too difficult for you?” She asks this with a soft, husky voice. I can tell that right now she’s afraid too.

“It might be. But I want it.”

So she clings to me, and we don’t talk anymore. It’s time for everyone to be seated for the auction. But ahead of the auction, three brave women stand up to tell their stories.

They are ugly stories. And I am bruised by each and every one of them. More than that, they remind me of things I’ve left in dark spaces inside me.

Memories I wish hadn’t returned.

I am left with my own brokenness. I despise it.

As each woman talks, I remember cowering as my father kicked me. Hit me. I remember saying the wrong thing, and not understanding why my mother’s face went from something placid to something filled with rage. Slapping me. Yelling at me. Telling me that I’m worthless.

Both my mother and my father hurt me, but in different ways. My father told me that I had to be ruthless. That I have no emotions. That I feel no pain. He told me that I was strong.

My mother told me that I was the worst thing that ever happened to her. That I was small and pointless.

Somewhere in there, is me. I am neither of the things my parents wished for me to be, or accused me of being.

I’m just a black hole of pain. The place where my mother poured her helpless rage at being stuck in a relationship with a man who would ultimately take her life.

The place my father sought to make an image of himself.

And none of it was ever about who I was. None of it was ever about what I wanted, or what I could become.

I am shaped by violence. And I don’t know if I can ever be made into a different form.

The auction begins, and they start with art by Cassandra’s friends, and I take that moment to leave the room.

I walk outside into the night, and stand beneath the stars, barely able to breathe.

“Dragos?”

Her soft voice surprises me.

“You can go back inside to the auction.”

“What’s wrong?”

I don’t want to tell her. I don’t want to tell anybody. Because those two things inside of me are fighting with each other. The desire to be bulletproof, like my father told me I had to be, and the desire to protect the boy who felt very small when his mother looked at him like something she hated.

I don’t want to tell her. And I wouldn’t have. Not in the past.

I would’ve shut her down; I would’ve lashed out at her. Like I did that night she left me. I would have pushed her away.

But I have to do something different now. Because that’s why we are in this marriage again. Because she’s decided to give me a chance to change. Which means I actually have to do it. Now. When it is so difficult. When I can barely breathe around the pain inside of me.

“I don’t know how to talk about these things,” I say.

“I never have before. I’ve told you about what happened.

I told you about my childhood. But it’s…

Seeing this pain and other people. Realizing that it’s real pain.

That the fear I felt was not small. And that it’s…

It’s shaped me into what I am. No one ever loved me.

Not ever. And I feel so much… Sorrow. For that boy.

Whose parents only saw him as something to vent their rage on, something to mold and shape and manipulate.

” I wince. “And then I manipulated you. What if this is the only way that I ever know how to relate to other people? What if I am actually doomed to repeat the same things?”

This is the deepest fear I have. That no matter how badly I want to change, no matter who I want to become, it’s too late for me.

I had a window into what I could be like as a new man, with a clean slate.

What if it was only ever a glimpse into a life I can never have?

“You aren’t,” she says softly, putting her hand on my shoulder.

“Dragos, you’re not your father. I know you’re not, because you just dismantled everything he spent a lifetime building.

Because you have actually decided that there is something more important than winning.

You’ve decided there is something more important than amassing wealth.

Control. He never did. He died hurting a child.

He lived by the sword and he died by it.

But you’ve decided to put it down. That is different. ”

“But you… You want children. You want children, and I… My mother hated me. She saw me as something that got her stuck with my father, and she wasn’t wrong.

She was killed because she was trapped with him.

And how can I even hate her, even though she hurt me?

She was stuck in a terrible life. With an awful man.

One who was literally the death of her. Yet she made my life hell, and I never found that I could mourn her.

I had no safe space in my home. My father acted like he was proud of me, but that didn’t come with anything better.

It didn’t come with anything less… Painful. What if I don’t know any better?”

“We just have to keep trying,” she says.

I realize that it’s time for her art to go up for auction. Her parents are in there. We have to go back inside.

“Let’s go. We can talk about this more at home.”

“Can we? You won’t shut me down?”

I shake my head. “No. I don’t know if I’m going to like the answer to any of this. But I know the answer isn’t in hiding.”

She takes my hand, and we go back inside. The auction begins, and I feel badly that I have taken her away from this moment. Because her work goes for an astronomical sum. I consider bidding on it, but I don’t have to. And I know she would be happier if it isn’t bought by her husband.

Her triumph is happening right when I am falling to pieces.

It feels like a disservice to her. She married a strong, ruthless man who didn’t know how to give love in any capacity. But she has ended up with a man who wants to give her things he’s not sure he knows how to find. A man who is fraying at the edges.